


How to Tame Stray Cats

by orphan_account



Series: Devils and Humans Cry [4]
Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Childhood Trauma, Gangs, Grief/Mourning, Harm to Children, Hurt/Comfort, Incest, Loneliness, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Stories I cried while writing, Survivor Guilt, Wet Dream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-23
Updated: 2020-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-12 19:47:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22855054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Dante tore Nero's arm off. Nero chooses an unusual -- but fitting -- method of retaliation.
Relationships: Dante & Vergil (Devil May Cry), Dante/Nero (Devil May Cry), Nero & Vergil (Devil May Cry)
Series: Devils and Humans Cry [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639852
Comments: 4
Kudos: 127





	How to Tame Stray Cats

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JoAsakura](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JoAsakura/gifts).

> A good idea to read the rest of the series first, but if you'd rather not, this is an AU in which Dante is the one who fell and became Mundus' slave, while Vergil went on. Nero's life is very different, as a result.

When Nero finds the beast in an old culvert, crouched beneath a stream of filthy gutter water, his first impulse is not to attack. There are many reasons for this.

#

The demon in blue appears when Nero is ten years old, and destroys the only family he has ever known. Nero gives chase and catches up to the demon by the sea, near a smoking pile of rubble that was once a massive white statue. Nero challenges the demon, of course, but the creature is terrifying in its power. It shrugs off Nero's flying kick and then strikes him down with a single sword-sheath blow. When Nero wakes hours later, his right forearm has turned into a horrifying thing of blue-black armor and immense power -- and the demon is still there, watching waves roll in with the evening tide. To all appearances the demon is a human man, young-faced despite his white hair, who stands with his back to Nero. Nero knows this is a lie, however. He can sense the monster inside that human facade.

"I assume you want something from me," says the demon in blue, his words as crisp-edged as the folds of his blue coat, as Nero struggles to his feet.

Nero hurts all over. Some of his bones tingle in a way that speaks of recent accelerated healing. For him to still feel pain at this point means he must have been half-dead after that one casual blow. None of it hurts as much, however, as thinking of Kyrie's weeping face. "Credo was like a brother to me!" he shouts at the demon. "He was good, you fuck! Everyone you've killed, they were good people!"

"A brother..." That seems to affect the demon more than anything else Nero has done, though only for a moment. Just a pause, a whiff of sorrow in the air, a softening of the edge to his voice. Then he sighs. "This Order isn't what you seem to think it is, but a brother must be avenged. So, here."

And the demon tosses a sword, pulled from nowhere, to lie at Nero's feet. The thing is bigger than Nero's whole body, and grotesque. A spine of living bone supports its scythe-like blade, connected by some kind of knotted, inhuman tissue and armor. And yet, the power that the thing radiates is staggering.

He doesn't want to touch the gross sword, but he grabs its hilt in both hands anyway. For Credo. It's like trying to lift a mountain. He manages to straighten with the hilt, at least, but he can't pick the blade up off the sand. Worse, the thing is _reacting_ to him, curling through his mind and considering what it finds.

_Too young, child,_ it growls at him, in a voice that is darkly amused but also somehow kindly. _Too small. Come back in five years, perhaps._

"I need more power," he grates, glaring at the back of the demon in blue.

The demon makes a soft, amused sound. "Grow stronger, then. And come find me, once you have, at Devil May Cry."

Then he walks off. Nero shouts at his back, drags the awful sword along the beach after him, then falls to his knees to weep in deep, anguished sobs, long after the demon has turned into a monster of black scales and blue fire, and flown off.

It is the beginning to a year of hell for the boy. With the Order's upper echelons decimated, Fortuna's economy collapses. Demons run rampant over the island, and only a bare handful of Holy Knights remain to fight back. Kyrie is adopted by another Order family, but they do not want a boy who was already adopted once, and failed his first family. That isn't what they say when they reject Nero -- they actually seem to think he's a demon too, which is perhaps understandable given his arm -- but it's what Nero feels. And though Kyrie begs them not to, they leave Fortuna with her, moving to the mainland where there are jobs. Nero goes to an orphanage, where the caretakers openly despise him. There are rolling blackouts and demon sightings every day, and not much food, and no one cares if he actually goes to school or not. 

Kyrie writes when she can, but otherwise Nero is inexpressibly lonely, which he expresses by beating the shit out of every child who gives him lip about his arm or lost family. As a result of this, _everyone_ leaves him alone, which makes him lonelier still. He blames the demon in blue for all of it -- the loss of his family and secure existence, the end of his happiness, the erosion of his humanity. Much, much later, when he learns the full history of his family, he will think, _The demon in blue was my Mundus_, and not be far off.

#

Nero feels the beast stalking him for weeks after he finds the culvert. It's not as disturbing as it could be. He works on the old van he's fixing up, and feels eyes on his back through the ceiling exhaust grate. He takes out the trash and catches a melange of fresh scents that should not be present -- the culvert and the sword, and the bitter, sickly scent of the beast that took his arm. He heads up into the mountains to practice (he can still fight with one arm and an old discarded Order sword, but his balance is different and he needs to get used to it), and sees a silhouette crouched on a higher ridge. Occasionally he stops practicing and turns to face this shadow, with his sword propped on one shoulder. "Come on," he challenges, but the beast only slinks away. He can't figure out why, at first. It took his arm to get the sword stored inside. What good is a sword if you don't use it?

But there is no malice in the beast's scrutiny. No killing intent. It has never seemed hostile, not even on the night that it came to the garage, almost unrecognizable as a person because it was so covered in mud and rags and the thick stenches of hell and unfathomable realms between. Since it was not hostile, Nero asked if it was hungry. He had some chili in the crock pot. Then it blurred and tore his fucking arm off and left him to fumble a tourniquet onto himself just before he passed out from the blood loss. He should hate it for that alone. He's _tried_ to hate it. But doing so feels like hating a stray cat for scratching when you reach for it too soon. Some things are just nature.

Which is why he didn't attack, when he later found the beast's nest in the old culvert; he just made a note of it, and marked out a radius of a few miles around that site as the beast's likely territory. And which is why he starts leaving invitations, of a sort, in places where the creature will find them. A pile of fresh clothing, so it can stop wearing those stinking hell-rags. Food. Once, experimentally, Nero leaves a small pile of alcohol on top of the ridge, too high for humans to get to easily. When he checks back, the bottles of beer have been scattered and the wine is untouched, but the little flask of whiskey is gone. A word has been scratched into the dust: ThANk. The "N" is backwards, the letters crookedly formed, and there's a weird space after the first letter -- as if, Nero realizes in a flash of intuitive insight, the beast started to write, then was startled to realize it knew how, then had to work to remember the rest. As if it was a person once, not a beast, and Nero's little gifts are starting to remind -- _him_ \-- of what he was.

Nero smiles, delighted. Sometimes, with a lot of work and a little blood, even stray cats can be socialized. So Nero starts planning his trap.

#

Everything gets better when he joins a gang. Lots of functionally-orphaned kids on Fortuna, and life is hard; everyone does what they have to, to survive. The older boys are rough with their affection, punching each other as often as they hug, but they are generous with both, and Nero needs this so very, very much as puberty falls upon him and ravages him like a beast. The gang gives him everything during that formative time: extra food, money, welcome of his strength, acceptance of his deformed arm, lessons on loyalty and true friendship, the space to practice with his huge ugly sword, comfort in the wake of his losses. He sleeps at the orphanage and still goes to school enough to learn, but for all intents and purposes the gang's old truck-repair garage becomes his new home, the gang members his new family. With their help, he heals, and in their presence, he loses some, though not all, of his anger. Just enough to keep it from becoming an obsession.

When Nero is fourteen, another boy his age notices that Nero is shyly looking at him. The boy shyly smiles back. In the quiet shadows, after quiet confessions, Nero has his first kiss. And because it's impossible to keep secrets in a group of gossipy teen boys, the gang's leader later hooks Nero around the neck and gives him noogies and teases that isn't it cute, their little shitkicker is fruity as a cake. Afterward he hands Nero some condoms and lube and tells him how to use both (while Nero's face burns). Nero and his paramour cannot look at each other afterward. Not without grinning in anticipation.

The next day he comes to the gang's garage to find all of them gone. 

There are signs of a fight: blood splashed on stone, a sulfur stench he associates with demons, though strangely artificial somehow. He tracks this to a laboratory underneath Fortuna Castle. There he finds a stuttering scientist who rants about needing "raw materials" and Nero's arm -- and who has turned all of Nero's friends into monsters. The gang's leader stumbles toward Nero, bound within a suit of demonic armor that eats at both his flesh and free will. He begs to die, and Nero slays him because that is the only kindness possible. Then he finds the body of his love, who did not survive demonification, in the scientist's "discard" pile.

His Devil Trigger is only a half-formed shadow, precursor of the might he will one day possess as an adult, but the blazing murder in his aura is more than enough to terrify the scientist into confessing everything. And once again, Nero's world is destroyed.

The demon in blue is his _father_, Vergil, firstborn son of Sparda himself. The Order has always known Nero's parentage. It's why Credo and Kyrie's parents adopted him. It's why Credo, like all the other Holy Knights, _turned himself into a demon_. All of this has been in service to the Order's goal of world conquest -- and they meant to enslave Nero, and use his innate power, in the final stages of this goal.

Nero kills his friends. It's either that or leave them to suffer. He kills the stuttering scientist, who is a demon too, and who means to start the Order's evil all over again. He kills his way through the underground facility, kills the other survivors of Vergil's purge, kills any chance of the Order ever rising again to do this to anyone else. And as Nero bathes in fury and vengeance and blood, he begins to understand that he is not human either -- but he can _choose_ to be more human than these fuckwads, who gave up their own souls in the pursuit of power.

And afterward, sitting alone in the dust of the gang's garage and _not_ crying, because there is nothing left in him that can, he finally thinks back on That Day. The family that raised him is a lie, apart from Kyrie, and he resolves to stop writing back to her. The family he chose is dead. Humans are too fragile, too fickle, to love. The family that birthed him, though...

Nero runs fingers over his right arm. Not deformed, as he's thought all these years; just demonic. A gift from his father, who destroyed the Order to protect him.

_Come and find me at Devil May Cry._

No. He's spent too much time hating Vergil. He isn't strong enough to resist that hate, yet. He needs something else.

#

Nero baits the trap carefully: a thick sleeping bag, a fresh pizza, a big bottle of whiskey, the garage door unlocked and cranked just open enough to get fingers under, and Nero asleep in the bedroom upstairs. It's risky. The beast is still more beast than man. No reward without risk, however.

In the morning he is delighted to find the beast sitting on the sleeping bag with the sword in his arms, watching Nero warily. Nero goes about his usual business of making breakfast and then working on the van, ignoring his guest, letting them both get used to each others' presence and scent. Curiously, the beast smells less sickly today than it did only a few days before. When Nero leaves for a while to go and kill a bunch of demons on the east side of the island -- with the Holy Knights gone, he makes a good living renting out his sword -- he feels the beast following. The beast doesn't pitch in, but he lingers nearby. A promising sign. When Nero goes back to the garage, he leaves the door open and stands there in its opening, obviously waiting. After a very long while, the beast drops from a nearby rooftop to the ground, and slinks past him to curl up on the sleeping bag again. When Nero closes the garage door, the beast growls, glare flashing momentarily red with warning... but he does not protest beyond this. 

Progress.

From there, it goes slowly. Nero starts talking to the beast because he has no one else to talk to, but months pass before the beast says anything back. Sometimes Nero wakes up to find the beast standing over him, breathing hard, fingers turned to claws like steel rakes, teeth gleaming. Nero wonders if he's going to die on these occasions, because the beast is still so much stronger -- but the beast always turns away instead. One morning, however, Nero wakes to find the beast touching the bandages on his arm stump. Regretfully? Hard to say. But after a moment the beast's mouth works, and his rough voice grates out, "Should've grrrrown back b-by now."

"Arms don't grow back," Nero snaps. He's sleepy and cranky. Taming a beast is hard work. "I'm just going to have to get used to having only one, thanks to you."

There are times when the morass of who the beast is now parts somewhat, allowing pieces of who he used to be to rise to the surface. Nero suspects that person, the pre-beast, was kind of an ass. The beast tilts his head and favors Nero with a condescending, exasperated sigh. "_Ours_ grow back, d-dumbass." He retreats to his corner in the garage while Nero stares at his stump in doubt and wonder. A few days later in the middle of practice, Nero forgets himself and reaches for something with his nonexistent right hand, and suddenly the hand is there, at the end of an arm that has materialized out of nowhere. The beast, up on the ridge, utters a loud "Told you so" snort, then curls up to go to sleep.

It does not all go smoothly. The first time Nero decides to call his houseguest "Beast" as a nickname, the last thing he remembers is a ripple of power throughout the garage and a flicker of sickly transformation light, and then an enormous clawed hand coming at his head. He wakes up three days later in his bed. The sheets are stiff with dried blood. One of his legs is slightly crooked -- always a risk with accelerated healing -- and he has to re-break it in order to be able to walk normally. Someone has put a bucket of water and a slightly moldy pizza next to him, but the beast himself is gone. Only after Nero limps down to open his garage again, standing in the doorway for hours in a silent call of _Come back_, does the beast finally slink back inside, not meeting Nero's eyes as it huddles miserably in its corner. Nero hunkers down to deliver this message. "I won't call you that again," he says. "I'm sorry. I'll call you something else, until you pick something you like. Or, you know, I don't have to call you anything at all. Just stay, okay? Please. Just stay."

His beast pulls the sword closer to his breast as if for comfort, and for the first time Nero perceives the way the sword sends little tendrils of energy into him. The tendrils settle into his flesh and patch some of the infinite cracks and holes that Nero can sense in his beast's soul. It's healing him, albeit slowly. Making him better.

"I don't want to keep hurting you," the beast says to Nero. He sounds so tired. "I don't want to be a... _thing,_ anymore."

"Then don't," Nero says. "Let's work on that, next."

So they work on it.

From Nero, the beast begins to learn how to be a person again. When Nero watches TV, the beast does so too, a slight frown of confusion on his face the whole time. When Nero goes off to kill demons, the beast helps, and stares from a distance while Nero accepts money from grateful townsfolk in exchange. After a while when Nero showers and shaves, the beast attempts this, too. That's hard, and awful, because without the shield of dirt and clothing, Nero finally sees some of what's been done to him, and... God. The holes in his body are healed over and permanent now, but they should never have existed in the first place. There should not be scars at all -- and yet there are, runes written on skin and claw-marks where he has shredded the runes, zipline stitchmarks where he has literally been taken apart and put back together. The worst is that, as the grime washes away, the beast is beautiful. He lets Nero cut the mats and comb the twigs from his hair, and it is beautiful hair, silver and silken. He lets Nero shave the scraggly beard from his face, and it is a beautiful face, though gaunt and prematurely lined. Unimaginable, how beautiful he must have been before, if what remains is still so magnificent.

(The beast's real identity is obvious, especially after the cleanup, though Nero suspected already. The Order's dossier on Sparda's children was thorough: Vergil, the firstborn, and Dante, the younger. Both glorious once, but then Mundus took one and the other became an avenging automaton, so terrible in his grief that the Order concluded it was safer to raise his discarded bastard from infancy rather than even attempt to capture the sire. _A brother must be avenged._ Yes. But when vengeance is done, what of the broken shards left behind? Can those be put back together, somehow? If so, do they still have the same name they had before? It is a question that Nero decides to let time answer.)

Under the onslaught of such beauty, Nero cannot be a stone. He is a healthy young man, hybrid offspring of two species, one of which tends to find incest biologically advantageous and the other of which can die of loneliness. He tries his best, fights the attraction, but his dreams betray him, and more nights than not he wakes up curled 'round himself, panting and shuddering in the wake of an orgasm. Once, however, he wakes up to find that his beast has curled around him. 

"N-no," he blurts, when the beast begins to touch him. "It's not right. You're, you're not..." _Sane_ is the least-adequate word imaginable. _Healthy_ doesn't work either, because God knows Nero isn't a hundred percent on that scale, himself. The bottom line is that however much he might crave it, he will not take advantage of his beast, who has been a beast for so long. "...yourself," Nero finally manages. "You don't even know your own name."

The beast sighs into Nero's hair. "It hurts to want you," he says. "I do. But I have to fight to feel it, because... everything's broken and... _He_ didn't want me to..." 

He goes still, and Nero does, too. There's nothing to do when the flashbacks come but ride them out and see what's left when they're done. Sometimes it's the capital-B Beast, which wants to kill the world, starting with Nero. Nero has gotten much stronger, fending off these attacks. More often, lately, it's the lowercase-b beast. Nero's beast. This time, Nero's beast exhales, and pulls him closer. 

"I want to be good again," he grates at last. "Make me be good, Nero."

So Nero does his best. It's good. They make each other good. Nice to finally lose his virginity, too.

And in the morning, the beast whispers in his ear, "My name is D-D -- " Deep breath. He does not smell filthy or sick, anymore. Only of good things, like healing. _"Dante."_

#

Vergil looks tired, Nero thinks when he finally walks into Devil May Cry. It is a tiredness Nero knows well -- the tiredness that comes of too much loss, too many years alone, too much fear of reaching out lest doing so bring more pain. And perhaps Nero has been cruel to leave him like this, wallowing in the sorrow that Nero first glimpsed on a beach near a shattered false god, but he's glad that he waited until he was ready. Now Nero is strong enough not to hate. Now he can look into the filthy culvert where Vergil's soul huddles, and instead of simply putting it out of its misery, he can choose to lure it out and clean it off, and make it be good again. 

The shock and hope in his father's face are everything, when Nero tells him that Dante is alive. A year later, when Dante finally feels ready, it's even more satisfying to see the demon in blue weep on his shoulder. Not all monsters are defeated with swords.

And not all stories have happy endings. But some do.

**Author's Note:**

> This one is Joasakura's fault. Her story was too beautiful. It beat me up in an emotional alley and dragged this one out of me in response. Will there be more? Well, you know my bitch-ass muse by now. Tho I think Joasakura's might be bitchier and assier, given her output relative to mine!
> 
> ETA: the voice in the Sparda is... Sparda. The energy coming from the Sparda to heal Dante is Sparda's soul, doing what it can to help the most damaged of his children. And if it's not clear, Nero's been having wet dreams for a while, not just after the makeover. Dante knows because he's been (slightly creepily) watching Nero sleep for a while.


End file.
